The traditional broadcast radio experience has evolved over time such that devices equipped with AM/FM tuners and/or the ability to receive HD radio stations are often also equipped to access the Internet and listener location services (e.g. GPS). Traditional problems that still exist today with the broadcast radio experience can be addressed through the use of these device capabilities.
For example, a traditional broadcast radio, without access to the Internet, populates a list of available stations through a lengthy frequency scanning process. To frequency scan, the radio tunes in to every available AM/FM frequency and adds a particular frequency to a list of available stations in the event that the tuner detects a received signal on such frequency. Although radio tuning technology has advanced over the years to make this process faster over time, it still may take one to two minutes to accurately populate a list of available broadcast radio stations for a listener.
Another common issue with traditional radio is the inability to know what is actually playing on any given station, the genre of a certain radio station, and other information. After the radio establishes the list of available stations, a listener still must tune into each station to determine what, if anything, is playing and additionally attempt to identify the radio station's genre (sometimes through an analog RBDS identifier or by simply listening to the music being played). A listener may need to tune in to the station several times or wait for an extended duration to try to ascertain this information.
Although the hybrid-digital (HD) radio experience helps this problem by enabling Program Service Data (PSD) to include up to 1,000 bytes of data synchronized with a broadcast, this data is usually limited to small album art images, song title, and the like. In addition, changing stations or initiating reception of a broadcast exposes delays in the delivery and display of album art, and advertisements and promotional announcements that typically last 15-30 seconds are received too rapidly to display synchronized images that would be only sent over the air. This creates a less-than-ideal listening experience when compared to competing technologies such as online streaming and the like.
Another problem with the traditional broadcast radio experience is that it is isolated away from the types of media that are popular today. That is, a traditional broadcast radio tuner operates in a way that a listener must interact with a different piece of hardware or software to purchase a song, learn more information about a company advertised on radio, share a song on his or her social network, and perform other activities within social media, ecommerce, and the like. With this problem, the traditional radio experience fails to provide a user experience consistent with internet like systems or to capture all marketing opportunities with the user as it is limited merely to audio.
One solution to these problems is to eliminate the traditional radio broadcast in favor of online streaming solutions or satellite radio, such as Pandora, Spotify, Sirius/XM and the like. However, these services suffer from their own issues. For example, online streaming requires high bandwidth availability and may not be practical for long-term listening. Additionally, the high bandwidth requirements of online streaming may cause a lagged (due to buffering) or choppy listening experience in certain areas where such bandwidth is unavailable. Of course, the online streaming and satellite radio experiences may also require a listener to pay a license fee whereas the traditional AM/FM experience always will be free.
A combination of the traditional radio broadcast experience with Internet technologies and location services provides solutions to all of these problems. Accordingly, there exists a need for facilitation of a geographically relevant radio station guide and transmission of supplemental content over the Internet.